A half-day GPGPU tutorial session was given by Dominik Göddeke and Robert Strzodka in conjunction with the ICCS 2006 conference in Reading, UK. After a comprehensive introduction to the GPU programming model with many examples,possibilities to increase performance and accuracy in GPGPU applications were presented. (Slides and tutorial code)

In this masters thesis by Christian Fenzl (accomplished at the University of Applied Sciences in Darmstadt), an easy to use framework is implemented with additional demos to show the main concepts of gpgpu. Furthermore, a demo implementation is included which calculates scores on feature vectors used in a speech recognition system (about 12 times faster than an equivalent cpu implementation). An application with several demos using the framework including the fully documented source code (English) and the paper itself (German) is available. The framework code is recommended especially for gpgpu beginners to look into the OpenGL and DirectX code which shows how gpgpu programs can be developed.

gDEBugger is an OpenGL debugger and profiler that traces application activity on top of the OpenGL API and lets programmers see what is happening within the graphics system to help find bugs and optimize application performance. The new V2.3 introduces a Calls Statistics view that allows viewing the number of times each OpenGL function call was executed in the previous frame and its percentage of the total functions execution count. This information helps programmers locate redundant OpenGL function calls, state changes, etc. V2.3 also adds support for GL_ARB_texture_rectangle and GL_NV_texture_rectangle extensions. (http://www.gremedy.com)

gDEBugger, an OpenGL debugger and profiler, traces application activity on top of the OpenGL API, letting programmers see what is happening within the graphics system implementation to find bugs and optimize application performance. The new V2.2 introduces a shader “Edit and Continue” ability which allows you to edit, save and compile shader source code, link and validate programs “on the fly”. This feature saves developer time required for rebuilding and re-running the debugged application. This version also adds support for 8 additional OpenGL extensions. (http://www.gremedy.com)

The quaternion Julia fractal is a complex and beautiful object, yet its parameter space is difficult to explore due to the high cost of visualization. Fortunately, rendering the Julia set by ray tracing or “sphere tracing” its surface is an algorithm well suited to the GPU: it has high arithmetic intensity and uses virtually no bandwidth. A GPU implementation (with source) of this algorithm that allows real-time interaction with the Julia set has been made available by Keenan Crane.

gDEBugger, an OpenGL debugger and profiler, traces application activity on top of the OpenGL API, letting programmers see what is happening within the graphics system implementation to find bugs and optimize application performance. This major version includes two new profiling views: Performance Graph View and Performance Dashboard View. These two views contain performance counter graphs of gDEBugger, Windows and vendor-specific graphics boards (NVIDIA and 3Dlabs), including: CPU/GPU idle, graphics memory consumption, vertex and fragment processor utilization, number of API function calls per frame, amount of loaded textures and texels, frames per second, and many others. Using the gDEBugger Performance Analysis toolbar together with the new Performance views enables you to easily pinpoint graphics pipeline performance bottlenecks. (http://www.gremedy.com)